It Turns on a Dime
by L.M.Lewis
Summary: Timing is, once again, everything.


Disclaimer: These are not my characters and I make no profit from them.

Again, my thanks to the betas, Owl and Cheri.

**Author's Note: **Having opened a small can of worms in the preceding missing scene, I feel a certain obligation to cook something up with it. So this is another missing scene from "You Would Cry, Too, If It Happened to You"--which looks at the immediate aftermath of Jack Fish's plot to steal Hardcastle's files while the judge was off in Hawaii and Mark was home and purportedly in charge of the place.

**It Turns On a Dime**

by L. M. Lewis

There was still furniture in the gatehouse—that might have been Hardcastle's first clue. Anyway, it would have made more sense to conduct the questioning over there but, no. He'd had McCormick fetch the card table and a chair—one chair—over to the main house and set them up in the den.

If the man had asked, which he wisely didn't, the judge might have said something about preferring his own space. He doubted whether McCormick would have ventured a crack about the 'space' part. There was lots of it in the otherwise starkly empty room: every stick of furniture, every knick-knack, his _diplomas_ for Pete's sake—all vanished.

So that's how he started his inquiries, him sitting, McCormick standing, looking fairly downcast, yet edgy.

_Damn right he's edgy_. Hardcastle was well aware what was riding on this: _trust._

As far as he was concerned it was that, pure and simple. He'd left the man alone, in charge, with a fair amount of responsibility and straight-forward instructions not to do anything stupid. So far it looked as though irresponsibility and stupidity were the extent of it. McCormick appeared sincerely sorry, though maybe that was partly fueled by fear of the consequences.

Hardcastle hoped that wasn't a sign of yet more stupidity. Even in his book, negligence and bad judgment weren't capital offenses. Getting McCormick revoked, with even a few months back in the system as the automatic consequence, would put him at risk for serious injury, even death.

The judge definitely didn't want to discuss _that_. He knew McCormick was uncomfortable with any suggestion that he was a snitch—a collaborator. The judge stifled another sigh. It just went to show how far apart they still were on some issues.

"Tell me from the top," he said sternly, brooking no evasion. "What the hell happened?"

He'd already heard it, in protesting fragments of disbelief as they'd done the initial survey of the damage. This time McCormick told it in a more coherent, though still apologetically halting, fashion.

"So there were four of them, your friends—" Hardcastle prodded.

"Well, two actually, Mickey Noonan and Eddie Dyson—the other two were friends of theirs."

"Names?"

"Um," Mark frowned. "One's a guy named Frank. Seen him a couple of times. The other one," Mark shook his head after a moment, "I didn't know him. Not sure I was introduced. I was," he hesitated, "pretty mad."

Hardcastle had seen the upside-down card table, chips and cards scattered.

"And Mickey's the one who'd called—he called you."

"Absolutely." Mark nodded earnestly.

"And the rest of those folks—"

"Just started coming," Mark said, "all at once, like someone had given them a time to show up. They even _brought_ stuff. Dip, beers—lots of beers," he said in wonderment. "It was like a plague of locusts. I couldn't shoo 'em off."

"The gate?" Hardcastle asked patiently.

"Frank was running late; we'd already headed inside—the gatehouse, _just _the gatehouse. Mickey said he'd be there in a sec, so why not leave it open."

"You were suckered," Hardcastle observed dryly.

Mark nodded again, this time shame-faced. He heaved a sigh. "I heard a couple of cars pull in. One was a Volkswagen van—_eight_ girls got out. I thought for a second that it was Mick's idea of a joke: that many for the four of us—but next thing I knew they'd spread out. It was like herding goddamn cats." He dropped his chin and pinched the bridge of his nose, then shook his head slowly. "Next thing after _that_, the driveway's wall-to-wall, the house is packed--pandemonium."

He pulled up short, as though he'd gotten a little further into the gory details than he'd intended. If so, he must've found some cold comfort in Hardcastle's grim but unhorrified expression. So far, at least, there'd been no screaming.

Instead, the older man said simply, "And . . .?"

Mark looked as if he were thinking about that one briefly, then wisely chose to skip over part of the quagmire, or at least skirt around it.

"And I went back out to the gatehouse—the four of them were just sitting there, playing a hand. I let Mickey have it. He and Eddie acted like there was nothing wrong."

"And the rest of those guys—the other two?"

Mark looked puzzled at this line of questioning. "Um, well, they didn't say much."

"The one you didn't know by name," the judge asked, still remarkably patient, "do you think you could pick him out of a mug book, or a line-up?"

Mark frowned, even squinted a little. "He was, um, my age, maybe a couple years older. Dark hair . . ."

"So you couldn't."

There was a moment of hesitation and then a reluctant head shake from McCormick, followed by a slowly gathering look of questioning puzzlement.

"Ah—" he looked around for a moment as though he might have missed something. Hardcastle had retrieved a spare phone from the garage and plugged it in so it wasn't that. "How come—?"

The judge didn't let him get any further before he interjected gruffly, "Because this is personal, got that? I want a crack at these guys myself before I call in the cops. They'll just slow me down with a bunch of fool questions right now."

There. McCormick looked fairly convinced, more by the vehemence than the words perhaps, and Hardcastle had managed to avoid saying: _"And a police report means you get questioned and the parole board gets involved."_

Hardcastle pulled back a little, not exactly retrenching, but changing directions slightly. He pinned the younger man with a stare—trying for intensity but holding judgment in reserve.

"Mickey and Eddie, neither one of them said _anything_ to you about what their intentions were—nothing about the files?"

Mark stared back at him blankly, as though the very idea were absurd. He finally sputtered out a, "No, why would they do _that_?"

Hardcastle accepted the answer and ignored the question. There was no pause before he asked the follow-up:

"If one of them had, what would you have said?"

This time Mark's expression had slid all the way to utter bafflement, tinged with an element of hurt. There was a pause, brief—just long enough for the younger man to draw a deep breath and then say, "You still have to ask, huh?"

"Damn right I do."

"Okay, yeah," Mark said, back to being apologetic. He obviously still didn't get it. "I would have told them to go pound sand. I probably would have called Lieutenant Harper for some official back-up just to make sure." He shook his head. "Too bad they knew me well enough not to ask."

Hardcastle couldn't help it; he felt the chill go down his spine even at imagining the outcome of that confrontation. He still wasn't sure who was behind this coordinated assault on his home and his files, but it obviously wasn't those two bozos who'd been the front-men for the operation.

"But nobody asked you anything?" he said wearily.

Mark shook his head, still looking puzzled. "That's when the phone rang; that's why I kinda barked at you. Sorry about that, too. I'd just got finished chewing Mickey a new one when I picked it up."

"And I told you to come get me at the airport," Hardcastle said, unable to keep all of the astonishment out of his voice. "And you told Mickey you were leaving, and to have the place cleaned up by the time you got back."

The idea that some twenty-four hours earlier, at a luau no less, he'd had a moment of epiphany—fueled partly by the indelible image of Judge Schickelman in a grass skirt—that had led him, inexorably, back halfway across the Pacific to LAX, to drop a dime (figuratively, at least) into a payphone there and dial the gatehouse at that precise moment.

For a half-second he wondered if he ought to share his ghastly sense of enlightenment with McCormick, but, no . . . maybe later. _Maybe __never__._ At least he knew which mug book to sit the kid down with when they finally got around to rounding up the more elusive players in this charade.

Instead, he said, "Okay," wearily, as he finally stood. "Let's go find these two idiots and get my stuff back; then we'll run by Rosie's and grab the back-up copies of my files."

Having made it sound simple, he saw McCormick's shoulders relax slightly, as he turned to go.

_None of that_, Hardcastle thought grimly.

"You were just lucky this time," he said sharply.

"I know, I know."

_No, you don't._


End file.
